Saturday, June 28, 2008

Another Mini Challenge

So, for this challenge, hosted by 1330V, you have to grab one of your favorite books and list one of your favorite quotations.

Here's a secret. My favorite books is As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. I think it's really funny. I fully blame Mr. Edwards for that. He taught it as funny. Later teachers and professors have taught it as tragic, but really, it's hysterically funny in a midnight-dark comedy sort of way.

Plus, it has some beautiful writing in it.

"It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end." p.39

"In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were... How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home." p.80-81

"My mother is a fish." p.84 (That has to be one of the funniest and at the same time, most tragic sentences in American literature, even though it's neither without the context. But it's the entire chapter, and that once sentence fills the page in its loneliness and finality as one little boy tries to make sense of the death of his mother.)

"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others; just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear...

Anse. Why Anse. Why are you Anse. I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquefy and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full and motionless: a significant shape profoundly without like like an empty door frame; and then I would find that I had forgotten the name of the jar." 172-73

It was very liberating the day that I stopped worrying and learned to love the Faulkner. My trick was, anytime you *suspect* that something is going on, it is probably going on - this alleviated much of the confusion.

As I Lay Dying is my favorite, and you're right - it is really funny. I love the part where Anse sets Cash's broken leg in cement. Geez.

I bought As I Lay Dying a while ago, and had the intention of reading it immediately. But then I saw on several people's blog that it was their most dreaded author and I stuttered...maybe I should pick it up and read it!! (not today....I am out of the house)

My favorite book is "Your Best Life Now for Moms by Joel Osteen...a quote:

No language can express the power and beauty and heros]ism and majesty of a mother's love. It shirnks not where man cowers, and grows stronger where man faints, and over the wastes of worldly fortune sends the radiance of it's quenchless fidelity like a star in heaven. E.H. Chapmin

Itsn't it intersting how people's perspectives can change books? I read the book in college but would love to take a class with a professor who could make it funny! My perspective of the Wizard of Oz has completely changed after Wicked!!

I remember quite enjoying The Sound and the Fury in high school, but I haven't read any Faulkner since. However, I have The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and something else of his on my shelves that I got as a set at a library booksale. You're making it sound so interesting that I may have to push it up my list a bit...